This paper quantifies the extent of heterogeneity in consumption responses to changes in real interest rates and house prices in the four largest economies in the euro area: France, Germany, Italy, and Spain. We first calibrate a life-cycle incomplete-markets model with a financial asset and...

The purpose of this paper is to study the compensation for in ation risks priced in sovereign bond yields. And we do so by modelling the time-varying dynamics of asset returns and inflation, and then estimating the cost of hedging in ation risks from the perspective of a well diversified...

Households face earnings risk which is non-normal and varies by age and over the income distribution. We show that allowing for these rich features of earnings dynamics, in the context of a structurally estimated life-cycle portfolio choice model, helps to rationalize the limited participation...

I develop and test a model explaining the gradual price decrease observed in the days leading up to anticipated asset sales such as Treasury auctions. In the model, risk-averse investors expect an uncertain increase in the net supply of a risky asset. They face a trade-off between hedging the...

This study presents empirical evidence on the long-run motives for holding euro area money by focusing on the role of equity and labour markets. Equity positively affects money demand through wealth effects, as equities are a significant store of household wealth and thus part of a financial...

Based on a Financial Almost Ideal Demand System (FAIDS), this paper investigates the wealth structure of German households. The long-run wealth elasticities and interestrate elasticities were calculated using a unique new quarterly financial accounts macrodata set which covers the period from...

We show that household heads with a strong internal economic locus of control are more likely to hold equity and hold a larger share of equity in their investment portfolio. This relation holds when we control for economic preferences and possible confounders such as financial literacy,...

This paper studies the impact of major ECB monetary policy announcements on the portfolio allocation of euro area fund investors, using daily data between 2012 and mid-2016, a period that includes a variety of unconventional measures. We distinguish between active portfolio reallocation, driven...

We use cross-country microdata to analyse the risk taking of households in Europe and the US. Concerning the extensive as well as the intensive margin of risky assets, European households differ substantially from US households; but also inside Europe we document substantial differences....

Using university admission cutoffs that generate exogenous variation in college-major choices, we provide causal evidence that enrollment in a business or economics program leads individuals to invest significantly more in the stock market, earn higher portfolio returns, and ultimately...